Peter’s line “Where the walls themselves gossip of inquest” – his cry of pain to Ellen after the coroner’s open verdict on the loss of his first apprentice – cues the scenery and concept. The Borough, some of its citizens mounted on chairs and pillars permanently suspended above an unchanging set, is never absent from this stylised, Brechtian (and Weillian) production. Pountney’s stage has no room for naturalistic clutter – no real boats, no fishing nets, no beach.

The English director’s characters step out of years of “English” ambiguity into a light of glaring every-man (and woman)-for-himself selfishness. Balstrode listens to Grimes (Christopher Ventris, riveting) but only once (the capstan ensemble) does anything to help him; in the pub he gropes the women as much as Boles. Auntie, a red-headed Widow Begbick played with Oscar-winning charisma by Liliana Nikiteanu, and her Nieces are, quite openly, a Madame and her whores (with very visible drawers). Hobson, another terrifyingly intense portrayal, is a lazy, uncooperative psychopath, roused only by drink and the prospect of violence. Ellen is allowed more intimacy with Peter than one often sees (the beginning of the first Sea Interlude transition is used by the director to limn a relationship just on the verge of becoming physical) but, as soon as she realises his obsessive work methods will never change, her “Peter – we’ve failed” is final, provoking Grimes to inevitable self-destruction. In a penultimate Mad Scene of haunting, almost religious (or sacrilegious) beauty, she and Balstrode sit with a dead boy each draped across their laps, either side of the constantly see-sawing Peter on a stylised boat platform with a cross-like mast. Unforgettable.

Soon-to-depart Zürich maestro Welser-Möst’s reading of the score is hardly less innovative, reminding one with its forward, motoric winds of some great, lost Shostakovich score and, in the dance music so present in the pub scenes, of contemporaries Weill and Gershwin. For the final scene, the reprise of Sea Interlude 1 with markedly different texts, Welser-Möst matches the unrelenting cynicism of the Borough to the suicide of their unwanted, overachieving outsider with an extraordinary timbre at once larger and more hollow than its Act 1 counterpart.

No Grimes on film is without some distinctive merit but this new EMI issue is carried by its cast, phenomenal chorus contribution, director and conductor to an important new interpretative level.